Unbound & FreeBSD: A true love story

This presentation describes how a well-planned engineering project for a DNS infrastructure running on a very big cell phone company had to deal with unexpected issues from external factors, and how they were overcome with the invaluable help of the DNS software Unbound, in conjunction with the FreeBSD operating system.

We will explore:

• Numbers and facts from the former DNS service that was running degraded
• Why a local economical crisis changed the plans of hardware/software to be installed by a vendor
• Why triggered the deployment of open source software on recycled hardware by in-house sysadmins
• And why lasted about 6 months without hassle until situation got back to ‘normal’ state.

In the talk we will also see different approaches done on a little physical hardware lab, with the invaluable help of stress testing/monitoring CLI tools, plus well-written documentation like Calomel’s website for doing fine tuning on both DNS software/OS.

Finally, conclusions and lessons learned are provided to have a starting point with a solid base and provide the necessary tools for new DNS projects.

Pablo Carboni

Pablo Carboni worked as Unix/DNS/Net Admin over the last 2 decades, specially with FreeBSD platforms, and latest times as DevOps. His main passions includes -but not limited to- DNS, *BSD, RFCs, low level protocols, and sometimes as unix developer too.

As an amateur developer (C language specially), he collaborated with Net-SNMP project by sending patches for multi-core CPU usage support under *BSD platforms.